Spring Flowering Bonsai

Prunus mume 'Kobai' flowers blooming at the entrance to the Dr. Yee-Sun Wu Chinese Pavilion at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. Photo by Steven Voss

It is peak cherry blossom time in Washington, D.C., and the beginning of a new growth ring. The birds, the bees and the humans are all swarming at the National Arboretum. The flowering cherry tree is the pinnacle angiosperm– that’s a fancy word for “flowering plant.”

The United States National Arboretum is a Clonal Germplasm Repository for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. Let’s just say it is a plant DNA library, but instead of books on shelves there are collections of plants in Arboretum gardens. 

The U.S. National Arboretum has more than a thousand cherry trees in their prime for viewing. While their twigs are still naked of leaves, hard wood branches are covered in delicate blossoms. Bees wiggle between the petals and pull out clutches of gold pollen. Humans put their backs against the flowers, smile at cameras, and click. Eagles are soaring and songbirds sing above it all! 

One exceptional specimen of cherry tree DNA is in the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. Check it out by strolling past the masterpiece bonsai and penjing in the Museum’s central courtyard, behind the massive red doors of the Yee-Sun Wu Chinese Pavilion. Rising from the corner, with branches that partially eclipse the moon gate entrance, is a cherry tree named Prunus mume ‘Kobai’. Less than a month ago icicles were dripping from its hot pink petals. 

This spring, the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum is displaying collections of flowering plant DNA in the form of bonsai and penjing. The Museum’s azalea bonsai special exhibit will be May 21st to June 5th. Some other spring flowering bonsai to admire are quince, maples, crabapples, firethorn, pomegranate and privet. The maple flowers will be small and subtle. They are often too high to see in the wild, so they are overlooked in the landscape. When viewing the blossoms in the Museum’s Japanese Pavilion, they are accessible, a perfectly sized ornament for miniature trees. There is nothing subtle about the flowers on azalea bonsai. Branch pads are pruned to such exaggerated forms that individual plants sometimes appear to be dancing for attention. Within the John Y. Naka North American Pavilion, when the breeze is right, perfume from privet bonsai flowers may be smelled before they are seen. 

One reason bonsai trees appear to be so small is because the size of leaves can be reduced by human intervention. Humans may withhold water or fertilizer to decrease their size. Or large leaves may be plucked and grow back smaller. Roots are constrained by high fired glazed earthenware, but the size of flowers cannot be reduced. Their function is to make future plants. As reproductive elements of plants, where and when they form on bonsai is controlled by reproductive hormones. 

In 1920, two United States Department of Agriculture essential employees named Garner and Allard discovered that many plants flower in response to changes in day length. So, some of the bonsai flowers being adored this spring first began to grow almost a year ago. Last summer and autumn when the days were getting short, spring flowers were microscopic. They were hidden within sheaths of dormant buds for their protection. Growth slows in the winter, but it rarely stops. As flower buds endure the chill they swell faster with every increasing degree. 

Specimens prepared for the Museum’s spring flowering bonsai displays receive countless judicious pruning sessions between flower formation last year and peak spring bloom.  Established silhouettes have been preserved with care not to revert century old bonsai back into a flower-less juvenile state. The common bonsai technique of pinching, or as an arborist would call “header cuts,” are used with reservation. The resulting branch ramification may not allow enough sunlight into canopies to disinfect the diseases flowering trees are prone to. The culture of masterpiece flowering bonsai by pruning is both selective and reductive. The strongest branches are often removed while leaving the little phototropic lateral ones. Those lateral branches, or “spurs,” as an orchardist may say, are where flowers are born. 

With all the help they are receiving from birds, bees, and humans at the U.S. National Arboretum the flowers are sure to be pollinated this spring. Another growth ring will form, flowers will become crabapples and exhibitions will change. This year, the Museum’s fall fruit and foliage special exhibit will be held from October 29 through November 13th. It will highlight bonsai and penjing from the collections at peak autumn color and ripeness. The seasonal nature of bonsai ensures that there is always something to look forward to.

Historical Tree Spotlight: A Cork Bark Collaboration

Parent and child style cork bark Japanese black pine. Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Arboretum.

For this iteration of our Historical Tree Spotlight series, we unveil the history and creative process behind a special cork bark Japanese black pine ( Pinus thunbergii ‘Corticosa’), which is truly a rare specimen. It is a variation of the conventional Japanese black pine (P. thunbergii) found in coastal Japan and South Korea. The cork bark variety of black pine has an overly active cork cambium that makes an already rugged barked pine a novel wonder. The tree prefers mild climates and makes for a popular and aesthetically pleasing choice for bonsai enthusiasts.  

You can check out the cork bark bonsai above at the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum. It is in a parent and child style configuration that has been in training since 1980, when two prunnings from another cork bark pine bonsai in the Museum’s collections were grafted to a Japanese black pine rootstock. The trees represent a mature parent tree in the wild that has given rise to a younger succession which has thrived under the larger tree's protection, yet reaches toward the light to become its own presence in the woodland. 

Read more about the Japanese Black Pine here in our Species Spotlight.

The textured bark of the cork bark variety provides an enhanced and unique look to this bonsai classic.

“The overall ruggedness of black pines in general is valued in bonsai culture, but the cork bark has the next level of barking that really makes this rare and prized,” says Museum Curator Michael James.

One of the cork bark Japanese black pines in 1989  after being grafted by Robert Drechler. Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Arboretum.

The origin of this tree begins in 1980 with the Museum's very first Curator, Robert Drechsler, who passed away late last year. Since cork bark black pines are difficult to propagate, Drechsler used his skills as a talented horticulturist to graft a branch of the cork bark variety onto a conventional black pine rootstock. Dreschler placed the graft low on the base of the trunk, as the difference between black pine and cork bark is so dramatic that a high graft will cause an undesirable inverse taper due to the thickness of the corky bark.

The addition of a second tree was performed in 1999 by the Museum’s second Curator, Warren Hill, creating the parent and child, or twin trunk style we see today. A later curator transplanted the bonsai into a round container made by the American ceramicist, Ron Lang.   

“This tree is a good example of the collaborative art that bonsai is,” says James. “The media is a living organism and has a lifespan longer than the average human. It requires multiple people in continuum to care for, shape and form.”

The main tree in 1989 before its current multi tree configuration by Warren Hill. Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Arboretum.

The Cork Bark Black Pine exemplifies a core mission of the U.S. National Arboretum, as it is a rare specimen of plant DNA. The arboretum collects, conserves and distributes plant germplasm, acting as a library of sorts. Their repository of genetic information benefits both the scientific community and the public good. 

James also credits the impact of this flourishing tree to the work and influence of Robert Drechsler.

“Robert Dreschsler said, ‘we can only hope we've left something behind that will live on,’ and I think it's definitely true in his case,” says James.

Drechsler’s grafted cork barks were originally a part of the Museum’s Education Collection. What started as a bonsai experiment and tool of education has become a collaborative artistic expression. The bonsai has been removed from the Education Collection and placed into the more permanent North American Collection.

The Ever-Evolving Art of Bonsai

The centuries-old craft is thriving as both a hobby and an art form, with contemporary practitioners around the world asking what lessons it can impart today.

In 1913, A shipment of plants from the Yokohama Nursery Co. in Japan arrived in the port of San Francisco, among them a seven- foot-tall trident maple destined for the Japanese Pavilion at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to be held two years later. More than a century old, the tree was an exemplar of the Imperial style, a type of bonsai developed for shoguns and feudal lords and named after the Imperial court during the 19th-century Meiji Restoration, an era of cultural transformation that arose following the country’s 214-year-long period of isolation. Evenly spaced branches reached out from a trunk twisted into gentle contrapposto, its clusters of spring green foliage suggesting the outline of an isosceles triangle. Like most bonsai from that time, the maple expressed an ageless ideal of the natural world wrested into equilibrium.

When the exposition ended, the maple was purchased by Kanetaro Domoto, a Japanese immigrant who arrived in Oakland, Calif., in the 1880s and co-founded with his brothers what would soon become the largest Japanese-owned plant nursery in the country. When the Domotos lost their property — which once spanned 48 acres — during the Depression, Kanetaro’s eldest son, Toichi, brought the trident maple to his own nursery in nearby Hayward, but by 1942 the family was imprisoned at Colorado’s Amache internment camp.

In the camps, bonsai artists — those forced, like the Domotos, to give up their collections — made trees and flowers from paper and wire, makeshift manifestations of their own heartbreak. After the war, when the camps were closed, those practitioners started local clubs as private spaces for Japanese American hobbyists, eventually welcoming a broader public fascinated by Japanese aesthetics. Toichi Domoto returned to his nursery, which had been left in the care of an employee, and began the long process of restoring his family’s prized maple. In his absence, the tree had grown scraggly, its wooden container rotted and its roots broken through into the soil below.

In the decades that followed, the Domoto Maple, which now stands nearly nine feet tall and is a centerpiece of the permanent collection at the Pacific Bonsai Museum outside Tacoma, Wash., became a living symbol of struggle and survival — and an inadvertent precursor to a new movement of contemporary bonsai. By training native species into sculptural forms that express their unique ecological and cultural climates, bonsai artists from East Asia to South America are proposing a new, expressionist style that both questions and embraces the constraints of this centuries-old botanical tradition, exploring the immensity not just of nature but of human experience itself.

A Rocky Mountain juniper created by Ryan Neil of Bonsai Mirai outside Portland, Ore. Chris Hornbecker, © Bonsai Mirai

The Practice of miniaturizing plants is thought to have come to Japan from China sometime around the seventh century, when the two countries formally established diplomatic ties. By that point, Chinese gardeners had likely been creating potted landscapes, or penjing (“potted scenery”), for hundreds of years, bringing nature into the homes of political elites, painters and calligraphers. Penjing, as it developed over the centuries, didn’t idealize nature but rather portrayed — or, as some bonsai scholars suggest, exaggerated — its strange, expansive beauty. Until the 1970s, when the Chinese government began codifying five regional schools of penjing, each with its own approach to styling local species through cutting, wiring or pinching, there were few rules: Early guides published in the 16th and 17th centuries suggested that practitioners should attempt to imitate values like vigor and austerity represented in classical landscape painting, says Phillip E. Bloom, the 38-year-old curator of the Chinese Garden at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. Often, the principles were abstract — an artisan might have aimed, Bloom says, “to somehow create heaven in the tree” — which left penjing open to poetic interpretation.

As early as the 12th century, Japanese craftspeople and monks had likewise evolved the art into a controlled, observational form that later came to be known as bonsai (“potted planting”); while the term itself had existed for centuries, it was not until the Meiji era (1868-1912) that it took on its modern meaning. By then, scholars had begun to classify elements like trunk shapes, branch placement and preferred species — any locally grown, woody-stemmed perennial with true branches and relatively small leaves, including pine, maple, juniper, beech, elm, cherry and plum. Bonsai could range in size from just a few inches tall to Imperial trees that could exceed six feet. Regardless of size or species or age, each tree distilled the sublime beauty of an ancient forest. Today, the Kyoto-based bonsai curator and scholar Hitomi Kawasaki, 41, compares the ideal form of classical bonsai to the kamae posture of Noh theater, with the actor’s knees slightly bent and arms held away from the body. “If you’re in that stance, it’s the most stable point, and if you can let go, it’s almost like floating,” Kawasaki says. “With bonsai, it’s similar: There’s a point of balance, you strengthen that point and everything comes into being.” When practitioners succeed in this, their trees can outlive them by centuries, their growth slowed, but never fully halted, by confinement; if the specimens are off balance, they eventually wither. Poised between control and abandon, creation and destruction, life and death, the art is, as Kawasaki writes in a forthcoming essay, “an attempt to find a middle way out of dualism.”

Though European missionaries encountered penjing and bonsai as early as the 16th century, these crafts were then practiced exclusively in East Asia by masters who largely tended the collections of aristocratic patrons or government officials. But during the Meiji period, bonsai specimens were displayed at world’s fairs in cities like Paris,

Vienna and Chicago, helping spark a craze for the aesthetic movement known as Japonisme, which influenced the French Impressionists and countless European fine jewelry and furniture companies. By the mid-20th century, though, both bonsai and penjing temporarily stalled in their home countries; in Japan, most nurseries were asked to grow food during World War II, and in China, the discipline was purged in the Cultural Revolution as a relic of the feudal past.

Neil’s Yatsubusa elm for Bonsai Mirai. Chris Hornbecker © Bonsai Mirai

Neil’s vine maple for Bonsai Mirai. Lani Milton © Bonsai Mirai

Despite that, the art form flourished in the West thanks to teachers like Yuji Yoshimura, who taught bonsai to foreign diplomats and American G.I.s stationed in Japan after the war, and the charismatic, Colorado-born John Naka, who introduced the practice into households across the United States. Working in Southern California from 1946 until his death in 2004, Naka made extensive use of native trees such as California junipers and coast live oaks, a departure from traditionally favored Japanese species like black pine, cedar and maple. He published a pair of seminal technical guides and mentored students around the world, inspiring new clubs to form in Australia and South Africa and across South America. Though Naka’s trees were formal — in his most famous work, a miniature forest of 11 Foemina junipers held at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum in Washington, D.C., tufts of foliage levitate around a cluster of pin-straight trunks — his cosmopolitan view of bonsai set him apart from some of his peers who, in the 1950s, argued that bonsai should be taught exclusively in Japanese. “There are no borders in bonsai,” Naka once said. “The dove of peace flies to palace as to humble house, to young as to old, to rich and poor.”

Then, in the 1980s, the Japanese practitioner Masahiko Kimura, now 81, rose to global prominence with large Shimpaku junipers contorted into clouds of foliage swirling around ghostly deadwood bases. If Naka described bonsai in the utopian language of 1960s California, then Kimura, who often gave workshops in Europe, espoused a vision for bonsai that was as vivid, muscular and ego-driven as Modernist painting, recasting the master not as a craftsperson but as an auteur.

A bantigue tree created by the Filipino bonsai artist Bernabe Millares. Courtesy of Susan Lee

Today, Naka’s and Kimura’s students continue to redefine the field: Take, for instance, Ryan Neil, who founded his studio, Bonsai Mirai, outside Portland, Ore., in 2010 after a six-year apprenticeship at Kimura’s garden in the Saitama prefecture, home to Japan’s most venerated bonsai nurseries. Neil, 39, combines his teacher’s formal daring with Naka’s open, idealistic approach, sculpting Rocky Mountain

junipers into pale white streamers or rugged bursts of deadwood reaching out from plumes of foliage. These trees, he says, “allow people to see their place in the native environment.”

On Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, Marija Hajdic, 45, celebrates seasonal transformation with wild plum trees that blister with pale pink blossoms in the spring, and deciduous hornbeams that drop their leaves each winter to reveal branches that seem to claw at the air. Like Neil, Hajdic works principally with foraged trees — known as yamadori in Japan — often gathering ones that are dynamic and wild rather than calming or geometric. “When I go to nature, I want my heart to start pounding,” she says.

In Japan, where classical bonsai still predominates and young people view the craft primarily as a hobby for the elderly and the rich, the 40-year-old artist Masashi Hirao, based in Saitama, has turned public demonstrations in which he plants, prunes and wires his trees for live audiences — a common source of income for bonsai professionals — into performance art, complete with live music, a practice that traditionalists have denounced as antithetical to bonsai’s meditative intent. In his displays for retail spaces and fashion shows, Hirao has suspended wispy junipers in tiered ceramics and trained variegated landscapes over precarious stacks of stone. “The trees themselves are not about self-expression. I’m a servant to the tree,” he says. “The way I put the trees together is how I express myself.”

Then there are Filipino artists, like Bernabe Millares, who work with the mangroves that fringe their archipelagic homeland, while their counterparts in Brazil, like Mário A G Leal, work with fruiting pitanga trees from their country’s tropical coast and gnarled calliandras from the northeastern bush. In China, WeChat groups dedicated to penjing have proliferated, introducing species and styles from regions that previously had no formal tradition, while a new generation of oligarchs has spent small fortunes collecting penjing, sometimes investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single plant. The venerable Seikouen nursery in Saitama teaches hobbyists to make playful, accessible bonsai using inexpensive materials — similar to the “pop bonsai” described by the author Lisa Tajima in her 2004 book of the same name — while the increased exportation of classic species, says Kawasaki, the Kyoto-based scholar, has led young artists to experiment with nontraditional plants like gajumaru, a banyan from the island of Okinawa, in the south, that is rarely used by older masters.

For enthusiasts who have taken to bonsai during the Covid-19 pandemic — Bonsai Mirai saw a 27 percent increase in registrations for online classes from March through May of 2020 alone — the art form has become a ready metaphor for days spent in confinement and has offered solace from the monotony of modern life, much as it did for its early practitioners. In a world shadowed by death, it proved that life would carry

on, even under difficult circumstances. “When I look at a tree, my troubles are gone,” Kawasaki says. “Humans worry. The tree keeps growing.”

Source: The New York Times

The Beauty of Bonsai: How Artistic Potential Inspired a Lifetime of Bonsai Appreciation

Sketches courtesy of Mary Ellen Carsley

Bonsai has great artistic potential both as an art form itself, and as an inspiration to other artists. Artist and teacher Mary Ellen Carsley exemplifies this potential by developing a thoughtful connection between bonsai and her artistic practice. A life-long visitor of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum, she has frequented the Museum since its inception in 1976. She maintains this bond by engaging with bonsai to cultivate mindful artistic experiences both for herself and her students.

The National Bonsai Foundation spoke with Carsley about her connection to the Museum and how her appreciation for bonsai is exemplified through her career.

Carsley sets the example for individuals seeking to pursue their passions. A trained architect, she left her own practice to begin a career as an artist and teacher. Carsley illustrated eight books before taking on a job as a full-time educator. She now shares her appreciation of bonsai, penjing and Asian art with her students at Severn School, where she remains a practicing artist.

Carsley fully embraces the opportunity to use artistic expression to stimulate cross cultural experience and personal reflection. 

“In the Western world, we're going really fast all the time, and there are some aspects, particularly in Asian techniques, for drawing, painting and printmaking, as well as calligraphy, that slow people down and make them more introspective about themselves and their process,” she said.

She and other instructors at her school began bringing students to the Museum’s collections to paint images of the trees and write poetry on the bonsai of their choice. After conducting the program for six years, Carsley and her students were interrupted following the Museum’s closure during the pandemic. She has since returned to bringing more of her students to experience the natural artistic beauty inherent in the Museum's collections.

“I really love making that hand-eye-mind-heart connection through the art for the students to give them that quiet, safe place, and time to contemplate and be in nature,” Carsley said.

While the museum remained closed, Carsley felt the absence of the place she had connected to nature and sought respite in since childhood. She frequently checked on the Museum's reopening status in anticipation of her return, not only to enjoy the reflective atmosphere of the collections but also to continue her work illustrating the bonsai.

“I was so starved for bonsai during the pandemic, I actually started my own collection,” Carsley said. 

Beginning with a tree gifted by a student, Carsley and her husband, Perry Carsley, now maintain a small collection in their home. She began her bonsai practice in isolation, studying bonsai books and making the insightful connection between creating conventional two-dimensional art and cultivating bonsai.

Photo courtesy of Perry Carsley

“As an art teacher, we teach using the elements of art and the principles of design,” said Carsley. “As I was reading these books, they actually used almost the exact same elements and principles in bonsai as I do when I teach drawing and painting. The whole artistic mindset is there, but the actual material of the art is alive and that's really fascinating.”

Carsley’s upcoming project involves tracing the progression of trees at the Museum that inspire her through the changing seasons (keep an eye out for her future works to find out which bonsai will be featured). Her artistic depictions of bonsai reflect a deep appreciation for shape and form, as well as Asian culture, with a skill she refined throughout her lifetime.

“When I'm thinking about my trees, my attitude towards them considers not what I wanted them to be but how to encourage them to be their best selves,” said Carsley. “There is something to be said for how you approach bonsai and teaching because your investment doesn't come right back to you right away. You hope to help both the students and bonsai grow into their authentic selves.”

You can enjoy more of Mary Ellen Carsley’s portfolio of work on her website www.maryellencarsley.com.

A Holiday Gift Guide: What to Get the Bonsai Lover in Your Life

Looking for the perfect gift for the bonsai lover in your life? Or maybe loved ones are asking what you want for the holidays?

Read on for some shopping inspiration from National Bonsai Foundation board members and National Bonsai & Penjing Museum volunteers. If you make any purchases on Amazon, please use our Amazon Smile link to help support NBF with each dollar you spend!

A NEW TOOL

For the budding bonsai master 

For newbies, grab this eight-piece beginner’s tool set from Bonsai Outlet. A battery-operated toothbrush is a great tool to rid tree trunks and branches of algae. If you’re looking to splurge, we’re coveting this electric carver from Smoky Mountain Woodcarvers.

A GOOD READ

For the bonsai bookworm

NBF published many books about the trees of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum in the last few years, including: 

• Bonsai & Penjing: Ambassadors of Peace and Beauty (Ann McClellan)

• In Training: A Bonsai Photo Book (Stephen Voss)

• The Peace Tree from Hiroshima (Sandra Moore)

• Forest, Rock Planting & Ezo Spruce Bonsai (Saburo Kato) 

• John Naka’s Sketchbook 

Find them in the NBF bookstore.

We also recommend John Naka’s Bonsai Techniques, Volumes 1 and 2, which many consider the “bible of bonsai,” and Michael Hagedorn’s latest book Bonsai Heresy.

UNLIMITED ACCESS

For the one who can’t get enough of bonsai

A subscription to International BONSAI magazine is a gift that keeps giving throughout the year. Each issue of this educational, professional publication is like a mini lesson on specialized bonsai topics.

A subscription to Ryan Neil’s Bonsai Mirai Live will provide weekly web presentations on all aspects of bonsai and access to an incredible archive of the last year’s presentations.

BONSAI PRIDE

For the fashionista

The National Bonsai Foundation is offering branded merchandise. A portion of proceeds from every sale is given to the National Bonsai Foundation to support the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum so your bonsai-lover can wear their pride and know they are supporting their passion as well. Shop sweatshirts, t-shirts, tote bags and even mugs.

A GIFT THAT CAN’T GO WRONG

For the one who’s impossible to buy for

A gift certificate to a bonsai vendor. The American Bonsai Tool Company, Dallas Bonsai and Brussel’s Bonsai are some of our favorites. 

A GIFT OF PRESERVATION

For anyone who loves bonsai, history or nature

A donation in their name to the National Bonsai Foundation to preserve the art of bonsai and penjing for future generations. Click HERE for more on how your donation supports NBF and the Museum. Happy Holidays!

NBF Board Member Glenn Reusch Passes at 78

The National Bonsai Foundation mourns the loss of long-time NBF Board of Directors member Glenn Allen Reusch who passed on Oct. 26, 2021 at 78 years of age. 

An avid stone collector, Glenn dedicated much time to spreading the beauty and history found in the suiseki collection at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum on the U.S. National Arboretum’s grounds. 

He was one of four founding members of the Potomac Viewing Stone Group in 1999 and remained their secretary from the group’s inception until his death. Glenn also participated on the NBF Board from 2002 until his passing. 

He served as co-chairman for the 5th World Bonsai Convention held in Washington, D.C. in 2005. Glenn also was the registrar and one of six organizers for the International Stone Appreciation Symposia held in Grantville, Pennsylvania from 2002 to 2012.  

The Reusch family is holding a celebration of life on Sunday, Oct. 31 at their home in Rochelle, Virginia. Some of Glenn’s exquisite viewing stone collection has previously been on display at the Museum: 

Coastal Rock Stone, Shenandoah River, Virginia (left) Human Object Stone, Basalt, Boise River, Idaho (right)

Please join us in celebrating his life in the comments section below. 

First Museum Curator Robert Drechsler Passes at Age 88

Affectionately known as “Bonsai Bob” in the bonsai community, Robert F. Drechsler of Cheltenham, Maryland passed away on Oct. 20, 2021, at age 88. Bob Drechsler was the first curator of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum at the U.S. National Arboretum, the first museum of its kind dedicated to the public display of the art of bonsai.

“The Museum is such a vital component of our desire to connect people to the value of plants in their everyday lives,” U.S. National Arboretum Director Dr. Richard T. Olsen said. “Clearly, Bob was touched by the wonders of bonsai and saw to it that this joy was shared through a career spent in service to these trees and the National Arboretum.”

When the U.S. government received 53 bonsai from Japan in 1975 for the Bicentennial Celebration in 1976, Bob was tasked with the care of these living gifts. Bob enthusiastically began studying and learning what it would take to nurture and train these potted plants. Scant information was available at that time. He had no internet or YouTube to teach him. In 1977, Bob traveled to Japan to learn how the Japanese had been caring for the bonsai. He learned first-hand from Japanese bonsai masters and nurserymen.

“Bob laid the groundwork for the Museum,” Head of Horticulture and Education Scott Aker said. “He always insisted on keeping the artist’s intent for each tree in mind when styling decisions were made. He never tried to impose his own aesthetic and served faithfully as caretaker for the trees in their critical transition to our growing conditions.”

Bob held the position of curator until retirement in 1998. He oversaw the construction of the Japanese Pavilion in addition to the North American and Chinese Pavilions. Bob also established the tradition of using local bonsai enthusiasts, whom he managed and trained, to help maintain the bonsai collections. 

Bob held many interests, including freemasonry, which led him to be the Grand Master of the D.C. Freemasons. But in retirement, he also regularly spent time at the Museum continuing to care for the trees. 

"Throughout his career and retirement, Bob was also a faithful supporter of the National Bonsai Foundation and its efforts to provide financial and programmatic support to the Museum, which he helped shape in its infancy,” NBF Board Chair Jim Hughes said.

Former Curator and NBF Co-President Jack Sustic said Bob’s generosity and dedication helped mold the Museum into what it is today.

“Bob was very humble and quick to falsely claim that he knew nothing about bonsai, even after 20 plus years of successful stewardship,” Sustic said. “Bob eagerly shared his wealth of knowledge, insight and experience with the Museum's history and care of the trees.”

In 2012, the First Curator’s Apprenticeship was established in Bob’s honor to train the next generation of bonsai artists. The scholarship has since been awarded to nine up-and-coming horticulturists. Former NBF President Felix Laughlin said he is glad to have the apprenticeship to pay homage to Bob and his legacy. 

“When I think of the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum, in my mind’s eye I see Bob Drechsler,” Laughlin said. “Bob personified all that the Museum represents: a national center inspiring multitudes of annual visitors with the beauty of bonsai, celebrating the legacy of all those who have made the Museum possible and assuring the health of the living collections for future generations.”

Bob (second from left) with three other Museum curators

Bonsai is Best of D.C. 2021

You voted, and the results are in! Washington City Paper has published this year’s Best of D.C. with promising results. We sincerely appreciate all of our supporters who worked to recognize the National Bonsai Foundation, the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum and the U.S. National Arboretum in so many categories. 

The results show that the Museum, the Foundation, and the Arboretum were recognized in a total of ten categories! Thank you for demonstrating the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum and the National Bonsai Foundation’s value in the D.C. community for yet another year. The National Bonsai & Penjing Museum has now been recognized as one of the best places to take an out-of-towner for four years in a row! Take a look at the total awards and honorable mentions below.

The National Bonsai Foundation:

• Best Arts & Culture Nonprofit — Finalist

The National Bonsai & Penjing Museum:

• Best Place to Meditate — Second Place

• Best Tour for Out-of-Towner — Second Place

• Best First Date Activity — Finalist

• Best Museum Tour — Finalist

• Best Outdoor Venue — Finalist

• Best Place to Day Trip — Finalist

• Best Place to Take an Out-of-Towner — Finalist

The U.S. National Arboretum:

• Best First Date Activity — Winner

• Best COVID-19 Silver Lining — Second Place

Sophia Osorio: An Apprenticeship Reflection

Sophia and Museum volunteer LeAnn Duling repotting a buttonwood from Mary Madison

Since the beginning of my First Curator’s Apprenticeship at the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum in the spring of 2020, I’ve had the opportunity to learn the skills and practices needed to maintain such a stately and magnificent collection of bonsai trees. 

While working on the trees, like daily pruning or watering, I have also been tackling an individual project. My focus was to study and select National Arboretum plant introductions, or species that were originally grown elsewhere, and evaluate their potential for widespread use in creating bonsai material. The goal of this project is to one day display these trees as bonsai at the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum in a collection formed entirely from U.S. National Arboretum plant introductions.

The two species that I had initially selected specifically are Prunus campanulata ‘Abigail Adams’ and Lagerstroemia ‘Tonto.’ While working on the trees, my mentors and I discovered that the graft of Prunus campanulata was not actually an Arboretum introduction. But we are in the process of obtaining a new graft of Abigail Adams that can hopefully be a success soon.

On the other hand, Lagerstroemia ‘Tonto’ looks like a promising specimen that will continue to form new roots and successfully live on for Museum staff to prune and wire branches for styling. Both trees provided a beneficial learning experience in handling grafted introduced species and what is necessary for any species to be potential bonsai material. Just as my project shows, plant introduction species can be explored and tested as bonsai material for many years to come.

As an apprentice gifted with the opportunity to learn about the art of bonsai and work alongside such an incredible team, my knowledge of woody and herbaceous plant species has grown tremendously throughout my time here. The Museum, the Arboretum and its plant introduction program have shown me just how much more there is to learn and discover.

Thanks to the Museum, I’ve experienced learning moments unique to this apprenticeship, such as what it means to have an eye for bonsai and penjing needs, how to wire a branch successfully for better structure and aesthetic or how to patiently prune and thin trees, making sure foliage is visually even throughout.

Some of my favorite memories have been with visitors who have seen me water the collections. Each day I received so many questions about the trees. As an apprentice, it was not only rewarding but also some of the best practice of my knowledge thus far. 

It has also been an absolute pleasure meeting and getting to know the volunteers who dedicate their time to the Museum each week, learning how they got started in bonsai and their personal experiences. They have been some of the kindest and most helpful people I have ever spoken to, and it is very comforting to learn from such a large community of people who also love to practice and work on bonsai as well.

I owe many of my thanks to the Museum staff, especially Michael and Andy. They have been some of the most insightful and talented people I’ve ever had the privilege to learn from. Not only are they both extremely knowledgeable in the art of bonsai, but they are both very patient and caring in their field and offer a range of information, practices and teachings for myself and volunteers alike. I intend to hold onto my experiences here and use them to start my own bonsai collection and as references for years to come.

I will be continuing to put my passion for trees to work, but on a much different scale. I have accepted a training arborist position with The Davey Tree Expert Company and hope to get my arborist certification. I am very excited and happy that my work with trees will continue, and I’ll be sure to visit and check on the trees at the museum as often as I can.

If it were not for the opportunity I was granted at the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum and U.S. National Arboretum, I’m not quite sure where I’d be. But I am eternally grateful for all they have given me and will continue to study bonsai.

“Sophia helped to maintain the National collection of bonsai and penjing through the pandemic, dependably carrying on an essential tradition of bonsai training that has allowed our specimens to thrive for centuries.  Sophia received a job at a multinational tree care company. An opportunity that will allow her to apply her bonsai skills to training trees of a much larger scale. That is something we can all benefit from!” — Michael James, Curator.

​​The National Bonsai Foundation established the First Curator’s Apprentice position in 2011 in recognition of the Museum’s first curator, Robert Drechsler (Bonsai Bob),  for his many years of service.  This apprenticeship supports bonsai scholarship and dedication to future generations. This year’s apprenticeship was funded by the National Bonsai Foundation, with the generous support of Mrs. Barbara Hall Marshall and the Joseph & Sophia Abeles Foundation.

After starting in February 2020 (and having some interruption relating to COVID-requirements), Sophia Osorio’s last day as Apprentice was Sept. 11, 2021. Wish her luck in her next endeavors through the comments section below.

Bonsai is Back: Words from PBA’s President on the 2021 Fall Show

Chuck Croft hard at work.

The weekend of Oct. 8-11, the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum hosted the Potomac Bonsai Association’s 2021 Fall Show (PBA) at the U.S. National Arboretum. In anticipation for the event, the National Bonsai Foundation (NBF) spoke with Chuck Croft, President of PBA and ex-officio member of the NBF Board of Directors. He shared with us his expectations of the Fall Show and what to look forward to in future bonsai events.

PBA was founded by a group of bonsai enthusiasts in 1970. The Association has a long history of contributing Museum volunteers and has maintained a close relationship with both the National Bonsai Foundation and the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum over the years. In fact, during the Museum’s conception in 1976, volunteers from PBA helped to maintain Japan’s bicentennial gift of 53 bonsai to the U.S. National Arboretum, which constituted the Museum’s original collection.

“NBF, as I'm sure you’re aware, is the primary stakeholder for the Museum and PBA provides the vast majority of the volunteers at the Museum,” said Croft. “So we work with NBF in that respect and many of us are NBF members.” 

PBA currently oversees seven local chapters dispersed throughout Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia. They prioritize bonsai education and community building by connecting mentors with bonsai practitioners at all levels. 

Chuck Croft’s history with bonsai began over 30 years ago. He has been elected President of the Northern Virginia Bonsai Society twice since 1999 before eventually taking on the PBA presidency a total of four times. His long track record of leadership in bonsai is bolstered by a commitment to educating others.

“The first few years I was in bonsai I tried to learn by reading and that didn’t really help much,” Croft said. “You learn so much more and at a rapid pace as a member of a club where people can mentor you and teach, rather than trying to do it by yourself.”

Outside of his presidential duties, Croft works to mentor others through in-person study groups, some of which last years. He also teaches classes and workshops such as the ones he was invited to do at Merrifield Garden Center.

Croft is looking forward to the Fall Show as an exciting in-person opportunity to gather bonsai enthusiasts and reinvigorate local bonsai activity.

“This fall show is an effort to get things moving in the bonsai world locally again,” he said. “We are going to show trees and have people there to answer questions and teach - socially-distanced - about the trees.”

For those who couldn’t attend the event, Croft has some practical advice.

“Learn about the horticulture of your tree,” Croft said. “Different species of trees have different requirements, as in watering and sunshine and so forth. Learn the horticulture of your tree and you will increase the chances of you keeping your tree alive.” 

Croft acknowledges that perseverance and reflection, beyond community engagement, are necessary to become a better bonsai practitioner.

“If you lose a tree, know that we all have,” he said. “Don’t get discouraged. Learn from how you lost it. Everybody in bonsai has lost trees.”

Despite the losses, Croft continues to maintain the legacy of bonsai through his work at PBA and his generous commitment to hands-on teaching. 

“I enjoy it,” Croft said. “It helped me when I was in a very stressful situation. I think the trees are beautiful and I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors. It brings me back to my roots in a lot of ways.”

The Potomac Bonsai Association’s Fall Show will be held Oct. 8-11 at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum located at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. Join us this weekend to admire the work of fellow bonsai enthusiasts from the D.C. metropolitan area. 

Thank you to the PBA volunteers and Museum staff that made this event possible. Event staff estimate that over 1,000 attendees came to admire the work of fellow bonsai enthusiasts from the D.C. metropolitan area. 

Readers interested in joining a local PBA chapter can visit potomacbonsai.com to learn more.